


Soporific

by gallifreyburning



Category: Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: F/M, Pure Unadulterated Fluff, dumbasses making out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-02-07 13:38:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18621730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: Leela and Narvin and three impromptu bouts of competitive affection. Set between "Gallifrey 4.2: Disassembled" and "Gallifrey 4.4: Forever."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, this story was inspired by one of [alyona11/ifailedtothinkofaname](https://alyona11.tumblr.com/post/184350211436/thanks-for-listening-to-my-complains-about-stuff)'s Leela/Narvin sketches, because her incredible art always sends me into a shipping spiral.

There’s plenty strange about the Axis - the shifting perspectives, the visible ripples in space-time, the multiple portals to alternative realities - but perhaps the strangest thing is when Narvin falls asleep on Leela’s shoulder.

She’s slouched in the corner of the couch, in the shared public room, and he comes to sit and drink his tea. Apparently the extensive torture incident on the monkey-filled Gallifrey exhausted him more than he’s let on, because he sets the tea down only halfway empty and slowly, inexorably tips sideways. A single snore is Leela’s only warning before his head settles on her shoulder, and shortly thereafter his arm twitches and lands across her lap.

Leela ought to dump him onto the floor and shout at him a bit, probably. But she remembers how violated she felt two Gallifreys ago, when her Interrogator General doppleganger put her to the torture, and what a deep sense of vulnerability and loneliness haunted her after they returned to the Axis. He must be feeling something similar, to have ended up here like this. Anyway, she’s plenty worn out from all the running they did, and Narvin’s warm CIA robes and heavy body ground her in a way she didn’t realize she was craving.

So instead of shouting or shoving him onto the floor, she bends her neck and rests her cheek atop his head. Occasionally Narvin twitches, murmuring unintelligible things in his dreams. With each twitch he settles in closer, his cheek against her collarbone, his opposite hand clutching her forearm. Her eyes drift shut, and she dozes with him.

At some point during this impromptu nap, she blinks closer to consciousness and realizes that Narvin has grown very, very still. No more twitches or murmurs, not even a breath. In her half-sleep, she groggily wonders if the monkeys injured him worse than they realized and he has died here on this couch. As she becomes fully awake, her instinct cheerfully informs her that Narvin is not dead at all, he’s simply awake and mortified at his current predicament.

For the first time in ages – since before they left Gallifrey, and before she became a widow – Leela feels warm, and comfortable, and snug. She keeps her body supple and breath steady, not wanting to give away the fact that she’s awake. She certainly doesn’t open her eyes because it doesn’t matter – open or closed, she can see nothing – but her other senses soak in every detail. His surprisingly soft hair tickles her bare shoulder and cheek, his shoulder pressed against her side. His grip on her forearm is gentle, fingertips resting lightly against her skin, and when he tries to withdraw his hand she hums sleepily and shifts her arm, bending it just enough so she can cup his elbow in a reciprocal gesture, and hold him still. She hears him swallow, but his fingers stay wrapped around her arm and he doesn’t try to move them again.

Still pretending to be asleep, she sighs and shifts her lower half along the couch, so their thighs touch and her torso slouches closer to horizontal. Narvin shifts with her, his ribs expanding against hers as he finally breathes again. This breath is a sort of concession, a surrender to the fact that he can’t move without waking her up – a surrender to the decision that he doesn’t  _ _want__  to wake her up.

Slowly, he tilts his face so the tip of his nose brushes her neck. Eventually she echoes the gesture, moving her chin down so her lips rest against his forehead. They stay in this position for a while, breathing against each other. His fingers curl against the back of her arm, fingernails trailing lightly across skin, and she sighs again. His body grows even more pliable as he shifts his shoulder, so his torso rests fully across her chest.

It occurs to her that he’s realized she’s awake – they both know now, that the other isn’t sleeping – and yet neither is willing to admit they know. This slow, sleepy dance turns into a silent competition then, each taking turns moving their limbs and nuzzling against each other, testing the other person to see who breaks and climbs off the couch first.

Over the next quarter span, they engage in this languorous contest, arranging themselves into a practically horizontal position like sleepwalkers dreaming of a finish line. Their legs tangle together along the couch, Narvin angling himself further across Leela’s chest. His arm curls around her ribs and his face settles into the hollow of her neck. As a counterpoint, her mouth trails along his left eyebrow, soft and unpuckered, and her fingers fold around his bicep. Occasionally she makes a low humming noise that might be mistaken for talking in her sleep, and wiggles just so, wedging herself further beneath him.  

At a certain point, his lips drift open against her neck and his cool breath tickles her skin. The sensation lights a new heat in her chest, directly beneath her breastbone. She hums sleepily again, tilting her face closer to his, in her boldest maneuver of this unspoken contest. After a long moment, he makes a countermove with all the careful consideration of a chess player, tipping his face upward so his nose brushes her cheek, and his top lip rests against her jaw.

She has never, even in her loneliest moments, considered kissing Narvin. By and large, his demeanor gives the impression that he’s never even heard of kissing, much less participated in such a rankly sentimental and crudely intimate gesture. But now she’s somehow gotten herself into this position, with her mouth a few inches from his, she considers it quite thoroughly. She considers the gentle sensation of his lip against her jaw, and she wonders if he tastes as agreeable as he smells. The longer she contemplates the details of this highly unlikely event, the more the heat in her chest radiates through her belly and down her legs, until she curls her toes into the couch cushion in anticipation. 

Before she moves past hypotheticals, Narvin mumbles drowsily and shifts his body along hers, moving their faces parallel, so the tip of his nose skims her cheek and their mouths align without touching. Even as that anticipatory heat flares like a solar burst through the back of her neck, she keeps her eyes closed. She wonders if Narvin has done the same, or if he’s looking at her now, studying her face up close.

She hasn’t kissed a Time Lord in a very long while, and if the universe has presented her with the chance to do so again, who is she to spit on such an offer?

Two slow inhales, and then she tips her chin forward so her closed mouth grazes his bottom lip. The pressure of his fingertips increases against her arm and he responds to her movement with one of his own, his mouth opening as he angles into her again. No tongues, just the delicate brush of lips and the sharing of air.

They stay in this comfortable, dreamlike space a while, neither of them escalating past this current level of contact. Leela has almost convinced herself that she’s still sleeping – it isn’t difficult to pretend, with Narvin’s chest atop her, his thigh wedged lightly between hers, his lips moving slowly but purposefully against her mouth. Resting securely in his arms, her muscles feel loose and luxurious, and tingles radiate from her scalp to her toes. 

Just as she shifts one of her thighs open a little more, in search of friction, a quiet mechanical hum enters the room.

“Mistress Leela, the Lady Romana sent me to fetch you. She requests your presence in the control room.”

At the sound of K-9’s voice, Narvin leaps straight up into the air like a cat hit with an electric wire. Leela is suddenly alone on the couch, and she can hear him standing nearby, his hands brushing down his robes as he tries to smooth out the wrinkles.

She sits up, running a hand through her hair, and smirks in his general direction. “I won.”

“You what?” he replies, and she tilts her face in the direction of his voice as she stands up.

“You flinched first,” she says smugly.  

“Flinched?” The word has a distinct squeak to it. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean. I fell asleep, that’s all.”

“Mistress?” K-9 chirps.

“I am coming, K-9,” Leela replies. As she leaves the room, she calls over her shoulder, “You may let me know when you are ready for a re-match, Time Lord.”

The sound of Narvin’s indignant sputters drift after her, down the corridor. 


	2. Chapter 2

Four days, and not a sign of another portal to an alternate Gallifrey. Four days, and Narvin has sorted all the items in his quarters via eight different organizational methods, and helped Romana resolve every last technical issue with the Axis’ mechanical underpinnings, and read all one hundred and thirty-six wildly outdated magazines on the coffee table in the shared public room.

At a certain point, all that’s left to do is contemplate the complete loss of his planet, his people, his career, and everything that has ever given him a sense of meaning and belonging. Instead of processing his emotions about these devastating things, he chooses to spends his spare time brooding over the fact that Leela accused him of losing a nonexistent competition on the couch the other day.

He didn’t lose anything, thankyouverymuch. He was sleeping. It’s impossible to lose a competition when you were definitely, objectively sleeping.

The real problem is Leela’s utter, unrepentant _smugness_ since the incident. She smirks at him regularly, and makes little comments under her breath, as if K-9 startling him awake (because to be crystal clear, he was _definitely sleeping_ ) was some sort of moral failing on his part.

He isn’t looking to even the score when he walks in on Leela in the kitchen, he's only looking for a spoon to eat his protein pudding. She’s standing in front of the replimat, feeling her way along the buttons to summon lunch. He stops at the table and nudges a chair with the toe of his boot, as a courtesy. She turns around at the noise, her blind eyes aimed in his direction.

“Romana?”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I am not disappointed,” she replies, turning back to the replimat. “You are just in time, because I am tired of eating strawberry-flavored food. This machine has been broken for two days.”

He comes to stand next to her at the controls, and realizes that somehow she’s set her personal profile to only serve fruit-flavored items. He changes the settings so she’ll only get potato-flavored instead. With a flick of one last button, he creates a bar and turns to lift it to her face. “Here. Better?”

She wrinkles her nose and reaches for it, catching his wrist instead of the food. Her fingers curl around him instinctively, and the physical contact sparks something in him, the culmination of his brooding, frustrated thoughts and the memory of their physical proximity on that couch the other day. Before she can let go, he steps forward and forces her flat against the wall. Her face tilts upward, blank eyes fixed somewhere near his right ear.

“Narvin?”

“I know you think me a coward,” he murmurs, his hearts thumping. Aside from her animal-skin clothes, she looks like she could be a Time Lord. Maybe even a pretty one, if he was inclined to notice such things. But this close, he can feel the searing heat of her human body, and smell the faint hint of her human hormones. She’s _alien_ – so very different from him and his people, in so many ways. "I don't care what you think, but you're wrong."

“I do not think you a coward. I know you to be one,” Leela says, lips curling into a grin. She’s never found him intimidating, and even now she obviously isn’t the least bit concerned by the fact that he’s pinned her to the wall. She could probably leave him on the floor with a single blow and strut away without a second thought. It isn’t as if he _wants_ her to feel afraid, exactly, but he wouldn’t mind a scrap of her respect. “Narvin, who would never put himself on the front line of battle, who always hides behind others. Narvin, who flinches and runs away when robot dogs interrupt our contests.”

“I didn’t run away,” he argues.

“History says otherwise,” she replies, lifting her chin a fraction. “In fact, I am surprised you have not run away already. Even standing this close to me has you more nervous than a cobblemouse. I can feel you trembling, through those robes. Are you so afraid of me? Or are you afraid of losing again?”

He ought to be afraid of how easily she could drop him, if she wanted; he ought to be afraid of the chaos she inevitably brings to every situation she touches. But on its most fundamental level, his fear is because he’s never been this close to an _alien_ – in circumstance, in emotional experience, in physical proximity.

“You’re completely insufferable,” Narvin hisses, simultaneously leaning down and kissing her, certain that a coward wouldn’t have the guts to kiss an alien. It’s basic logic, so basic that even a blind, inferior human like Leela should be able to see and admit his bravery.

She makes a surprised noise against his lips, and he pulls away. Her eyelids flutter a few times, her brow furrowed. She says, “You smell of potatoes, and your kiss is as lifeless as a flutterwing in a cold snap.” Just as Narvin realizes that he’s accidentally smashed the potato-flavored nutrition bar in his fist, Leela’s other hand slips behind his head, lightning-fast, and pulls him down again.

This isn’t a skirmish in the form of a gentle peck, it’s a full declaration of war, her mouth open and her tongue charging between his lips. Her fingernails dig into the nape of his neck, with the same sort of intensity she exhibited when holding him at knifepoint before they left Gallifrey.

His nerves flare and he freezes – Pandak’s ghost she’s warm, and alien, and strong, and alien, and a shockingly good kisser and also, most emphatically, _very very alien_. Her teeth close gently around his bottom lip and she backs away, pulling his lip along like a prisoner of battle. When she releases it, it sticks out a bit in shock, and she nudges the tip of his nose with her own.

“See? You are _still_ trembling. I do not need eyes to see your fear.” She grins lazily, ducking down and away from his grasp. Halfway out of the room, she calls over her shoulder, “Coward.”

Without thinking, driven only by his overwhelming, irresistible urge to prove Leela wrong, Narvin whirls around and catches up to her in three strides. Seizing her by the elbow, he pulls her close and kisses her one last time – his lips parting and tongue seeking hers, arms enveloping her as the force of contact drives her backward and off balance. For a moment she softens in his arms, bending like a reed in the wind, holding onto his shoulders and kissing him passionately in return. They stumble a few steps against each other, until her arse bumps the table and it scrapes along the floor with a loud noise.

The sound elicits a soft, surprised gasp from Leela, and pressing his advantage, Narvin tips her backward onto the flat surface, pinning her down, his leg wedged between her thighs and his tongue deep in her mouth. She responds with enthusiastic aggression, nipping at him and sucking at his lips, muttering insults between kisses.

A moment later he tears himself away, shoving off of Leela and the table and wobbling backward. He’s glad she can’t see his unsteady steps. Somehow, in spite of the blood roaring in his ears and his swollen, tingling lips, he keeps his voice even when he says, “See? I’m no coward or dead flutterwing.”

Leela pushes up onto her elbows, and her grin is even more self-satisfied than it was before this whole kitchen standoff began. She clearly lost, he indisputably proved her wrong, and somehow she’s _still smug_?

“I suppose a dead flutterwing could not have done that,” she replies. Her pink cheeks and even pinker lips are aglow in the Axis’ strange white light, her body still lounging indolently on the table. The table where they eat. Which is really quite unsanitary, come to think of it. He’s going to have to scrub it thoroughly before dinner.

“And you see that I won,” he says firmly, shaking his left hand so that the lingering pieces of potato bar splatter to the ground.

“I see you quite clearly, Narvin,” she chuckles, her blind eyes turned in his general direction.

Her low laughter follows him out of the kitchen and all the way down the corridor.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set after "Gallifrey 4.3: Annihilation."

Eleven days since they returned from the vampire-controlled Gallifrey, and Leela’s renewed body and senses are primed and ready for anything – for _everything_. A new planet, an adventure, a challenge. She spends a week exploring every nook and cranny of the Axis with her new eyes, and several days helping Romana (not pestering, no matter what she says) with her business matters. At a certain point, Romana’s preoccupation with surveying for fresh portals and different Gallifreys consumes her, and she kicks Leela out of the control room.

“Find some other way to relieve your boredom,” Romana says, “and leave me alone so I can concentrate.”

Leela decides that it’s time to test her hound-born senses with a hunt.

The object of said hunt must be the only other living creature on the Axis, of course. Narvin has recuperated fully from his injuries at the hands of the Vampire Lord, and has enough baseline intelligence to provide a minor challenge. She sets herself the task hunting without her prey ever suspecting himself a target – she must corner him without him noticing his predicament, and harry him into doing her bidding while making him believe he is acting of his own free will.

She peers around the doorframe of the commissary, watching Narvin at the table as he fiddles with a pile of metal and wires in an attempt to jerry-rig a staser. She could lure him into doing something for the sheer entertainment value, like embarrassing himself in front of Romana; or she might herd him into doing something useful, like cleaning her quarters.

But as her gaze lingers on his hunched shoulders and steady hands, it strikes her that he’s marginally more handsome than she remembered before her blindness. He tends to smell nice, too, and although neither of them has attempted to repeat the kissing incident in the kitchen, she didn’t loathe the experience. It was unexpectedly tolerable.

Quite like Narvin himself, come to think of it.

She will goad him into kissing her again, Leela decides as she comes to sit beside him at the table. After all, what fun is a hunt without some physical sport?

“Are you building a device to cook food?” she asks, even though she knows perfectly well it’s a staser.

“Not even remotely,” he scoffs. “I certainly could if I wanted to, but this is a staser. But we keep landing in war zones and on the wrong end of our doppelgängers. I never thought I’d be the sort of person to carry a weapon on the regular, but needs must.”

“That does not look like a staser. It looks like a child’s toy. My blade is a far better weapon; you would be better protected by one of the dull blades in this room, than that pile of wires and metal.”

“Time Lords don’t carry knives, Leela. Just because I’m forced to live with a barbarian doesn’t mean I’ll resort to your barbaric ways.”

“I could kill with my knife faster than you could draw your weak little gun,” she says, lifting an eyebrow as she casts a judgmental stare at the fragile contraption in his hands. “I could save your life five times over, before you pulled the trigger.”

“Hardly,” he laughs.

“If you truly believed that, you would be willing to prove it.” Her eyebrows lift, the first physical blow in this brewing battle.

He crosses his arms in reply, like a fencer deflecting a strike. “And what exactly do you propose?”

Less than five micrsopans later they stand together in the foundations of the Axis. A makeshift dummy fashioned out of spare blankets hangs between two of the ancient pillars, fluttering slightly in a nonexistent wind. This area is more unsettling than the rest of this already unsettling place; Leela has lived on Gallifrey long enough to be used to rooms that stretch into infinity, but she has never seen a space that fades into a void around the edges. The darkness eats every echo, and gazes hungrily at the light.

It feels dangerous.

Leela embraces the sensation, feeds it to her instinct, lets it saturate from her scalp to her toes until her hunting instinct turns into hyperawareness. She can practically see the individual threads that comprise Narvin’s field uniform, and she scents the soap on his skin and the product in his hair, and she can feel the vibration of his voice in the air as he says, “Stand back.”

“Your aim is so poor?” she teases, knowing full well what an excellent shot he is.

“I haven’t tested this weapon yet,” he replies, pretending to ignore her jab. “If it explodes, Romana would be quite put out if I accidentally killed you.”

“You mean she would miss her ‘pet savage’?” Leela says, holding her tongue between her teeth for a moment, after the last syllable. “That was what you called me, was it not?”

“Yes, well. You called me ‘the basest of cowards’ in that same conversation, if I recall.” He pulls the trigger, and with a loud clang and the scent of burning ozone, the staser blasts off the dummy’s left arm. Narvin’s face softens in delight and he lifts the weapon, inspecting it proudly.

As a weapon, it is cunningly built, Leela won’t deny. He’s quite good at this sort of engineering, and as he surveys his work, the joy in his bearing increases his attractiveness a great deal.

Leela sidesteps close behind him and flings her knife in a sudden movement, so her arm extends past his shoulder. The knife flies true, lodging into the blanket-dummy’s face. Narvin flinches in surprise, even as she steps closer.

“You see? Stasers are blunt, clumsy weapons – fitting for a clumsy race like the Time Lords.”

“Clumsy? Stasers have an subtlety your knife could never achieve,” Narvin protests, voice taking on that squeaky edge it always gets when he’s affronted. “Ours is the oldest, most august civilization in all of time and space.”

“And yet with a staser, your Time Lord fighting technique is the same as your kissing technique: crude and graceless as a broakir herd running off a cliff.”

He doesn’t answer immediately, slowly turning to face her. She expects the irritation in his gaze, but is surprised to find calculation alongside it. Not his normal calculation over which insult to hurl in reply or how to deliver it most fatally; a shrewder pinch to his eyes, as he allows his gaze to drop to her lips.

He has recognized her snare for what it is.

He is obviously considering stepping into the trap, anyway.

An electric thrill runs through her, her nerve endings alight with anticipation. One corner of her mouth quirks upward, and he gives an almost imperceptible smirk in reply.

“A knife and a staser are as different as kissing and seduction: different tools for different uses.” A clear blush rising on his cheeks, he proffers his jerry-rigged weapon. “I can show you how to handle it properly, since you seem incapable of grasping nuance.”

She holds out her hand to accept the staser. At some point between their fingertips it drops onto the unforgiving floor, fumbled by both of them simultaneously. It breaks into a half dozen pieces with a decisive _crack_ , producing an alarming spray of sparks.

Leela instinctively seizes Narvin and yanks him out of harm’s way, positioning herself between him and the dying staser. Within a heartbeat it has sputtered out, half melted on the strange glass-like black floor of the Axis foundations.

“Oh, Narvin,” she says in genuine distress. “All of your hard work!”

He’s quiet for a beat longer than he should be; she turns to find him looking at her, not the broken gun. “All technology has development phases. This was an early attempt. The next iteration will be sturdier.”

She understands most, but not all, of his words; his intent, however, is plain as day. _I don’t like you, but I respect you_ , he’d told her bluntly on the last Gallifrey, as part of his confession that he wanted her protection. But even with the hound potion, she wasn’t strong or fast enough to shield him from Lord Prydon’s vampire claws a few hours later.

“We break, and mend, and each time we grow stronger,” she says, lifting a hand as if to brush lint from the front of his uniform, her fingers tracing the path of the scar hidden beneath it, on his chest.

He takes hold of her wrist, capturing her arm, and leans in with an easy grace to kiss her. This is a surrender – a knowing gift of victory for Leela, on the impromptu hunt she devised. When he pulls away, his eyelids fluttering as if surprised at himself, he sucks in a slow breath.

“I do not like you much, either. But I respect you, too, Narvin,” she murmurs, the reply she never gave him on that awful dark planet. 

“Aha.” A pause, and then: “Really?”

She rises onto her toes, bringing her mouth to his again before he can ruin this perfect moment with any more words. Knowing Narvin, he would choose the wrong ones. This kiss is nothing like the awkward competition on the couch or the aggressive battle in the galley. It’s magnetic, but in a way where their poles were misaligned for so long, pushing and pushing each other away, until finally one of them flipped.

Narvin’s eyes close and his tongue brushes her top lip, and he leans in as she slips an arm around his back to pull him closer. She opens her mouth, tilting her head to deepen the kiss, inhaling as he exhales. She hums softly, a happy sound; it seems to trigger something in him, so he wraps his arms around her and brings their bodies fully together.

They cling to each other for a long while, in this dark, unreal place. Their kisses stay slow and gentle, lips and tongue and the occasional nip with teeth; Leela cups Narvin’s neck, her fingernails digging lightly into his skin, and he reciprocates with a palm flat in the small of her back, his thumb lazily following the outline of her vertebrae.

Eventually he releases her, clearing his throat as he steps back, obviously trying to gain his bearings. Leela watches him, her entire being buzzing and tingling.

“Well. I suppose I should. Um. I should fix that staser,” he says, meeting her eyes for a moment and then looking away.

“I shall help you,” she volunteers. Her lips feel slightly numb, a little swollen, in the best possible way.

Narvin shuffles back another half-step and visibly collects himself, reassembling the bits that fell apart when he was distracted, and barks a short laugh. “Hardly. I can’t imagine you’ve had much technical experience with weapons engineering.”

“I would never touch your metal and wire devices,” Leela says. “But I shall sit with you, and tell you when you are being insufferable and wrong.”

“Oh, I suppose that’s all right, then,” he replies, eyes rolling and words dripping with sarcasm.

“Excellent, we are agreed!” She scoops up the broken staser and practically skips past him, up the stairs and into the main living area of the Axis. She doesn’t have to look back to know that he’s following only a few steps behind.


End file.
